


Mise En Abyme

by PlainJaneEyre



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-11-30
Updated: 2014-11-30
Packaged: 2018-02-17 21:34:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 11
Words: 9,128
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2323919
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PlainJaneEyre/pseuds/PlainJaneEyre
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"According to the cards, she was clever and fierce and determinedly unapologetic." </p><p>"But this Finnick was a sculpture more than a man. He was gorgeous and godlike and terribly inhuman.</p><p>His smile, his laugh, his body: they were all carefully engineered tricks to make you desire him, love him. Just as her weakness, her tears, were a trap to kill you." </p><p>"It got colder and colder, winter approaching, and she built no fires in her house. She didn't deserve fire, a girl like her." </p><p>Johanna's written record of the occurrences after her first Games.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Editing.

The paper is slightly crumpled in one corner, from when she got frustrated last night and decided to get drunk instead of writing. The date at the top right corner is yesterday's, and it's written in an angry, slanting hand.

The paper, however, is beautiful. It's the kind of expensive, old-fashioned paper that most of the Capitol no longer considers trendy enough for daily use, and most of the Districts can't afford. 

The average person in the Capitol--the kind who think that dying their skin red and adding jewels to their teeth is a good look--wouldn't see anything very special about this paper. They prefer bright colors: cotton candy pink! baby blue! neon green! The actual quality of the paper doesn't particularly matter. If it's costly and it's flashy, they're all for it. The better to write enthusiastically worded invitations to Games viewing events.

But the official government documents? The letters of great importance? Those are written on the kind of paper that Johanna stares down at now. 

The Capitol considers itself so advanced, so unique. 

Each era of time fancies itself different, sophisticated. The past is barbaric. The textbooks proclaim Panem to be like no other country in history. 

This isn't true. The faces of power change, but they hardly matter. Change in government is of no concern to the spinning world. 

It is all entertainment, the turn of kings, of revolutions. Hunger Games are nothing to this. 

And each new civilization, despite its protestations, eventually comes back to the old things. Like crisp, creamy paper. Like whores and death. Johanna knows this, better than anyone, perhaps. 

The outlying districts wouldn't understand this paper either. The poorer districts use thin, yellowing paper that rips when you write on it, and the Careers prefer electronics. You can't eat paper, and there's nothing much to see if you don't know what to look for. There is only time for art when you aren't starving. And the canvas is far too often ignored, even in times of plenty.

District 7, however, is the home of paper as well as lumber. Johanna sees trees and men fall before her eyes. She sees the ancient beasts collapse to their knees under the strain of a dozen axes. Hears the creaking moans of the conquered. And she hears the cries of her own people, flashes back to the desperate, silent tears of her older brother after his leg was trapped under the crushing weight of green. Her people and her trees have given their lives, their bodies, to create this gleaming blank page.

She never could have afforded this paper before, Johanna reflects bitterly. Most of her thoughts are bitter, nowadays. After the Games, she can fill her house with ephemeral, empty ghosts.

The highest price Johanna has paid for her paper is to be desired. 

Some of the Capitol citizens are silly twittering idiots, who fill the Colosseum seats to cheer on the killing. These are mostly harmless, in Johanna's opinion. They just want sex, want the excitement and passion of violence. Flashiness is their currency.

The ones that concern her are those who beckon her with crooked fingers because she represents the intersection between life and death, between obedience and rebellion. The young girl with blood on her hands. They want to know how it feels. They are in the Capitol and the Districts. They want her mind.

She gives them her trees and she gives them her humanity and she gives them her body. But she won't give them her mind.

This is how she found herself here, sitting at her desk, staring once again at the piece of paper. She despaired of it last night, but this is the biggest revolution she can manage and so she must try again, for Johanna is brave, whatever else she is.

District Seven is not a verbose place. It is a place of hard work and repressed emotions. But anywhere that manufactures paper must have a love of words, no matter how contained that love may be. For trees write their own sentences, and District Seven knows that a true writer draws out those words, writ in the foreign tongue of ancient growths.

The best poets have come from District Seven.

Johanna must write what has happened to her. She must write it so that she can read it. Johanna is above all a reader, and as no one will write the story she needs to hear, she must write it herself.

She picks up the pen and swallows hard. The ink will not bleed through this paper, no matter how hard she presses. It is impossible to see the marks of one side on the other.

"After the games," she writes, "it all began and ended with Finnick."

She pauses for a second, jabs the pen hard into her cheek. Pain makes her remember that she's still here.

A splotch of ink forms above her mouth.

"Not in a romantic way," she writes slowly. "Although I loved him. But as the point from which all things came to and then receded from."


	2. Every Angel is terror

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The first time Johanna met Finnick, he terrified her as much as her own reflection.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title from Rilke's first Elegy.  
> Perhaps you're wondering what song would be a good musical accompaniment to this chapter. If so, let me recommend Robert, by the Dark Dark Dark.

He was twenty years old when she first met him. He was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen and he terrified her. 

She was sixteen and her hands hadn't stopped shaking since they got her out and pieced her back together. 

She just wanted to go home. She believed it would all disappear once she buried her face in her father's shoulder. Her father would pat her back in that gentle, awkward way of his, and her brothers would softly yank her hair and call her Hanna. Her men were huge, tree-like giants, with rough hands that never moved too quickly. They were of the old discipline of men that didn't know quite what to do with a girl, but knew some kind of chivalry was called for. And they loved her intrinsically, with a slightly puzzled air of complete acceptance. 

The Capitol buzzed with sharp, multicolored insects who spoke too fast and liked to pinch her cheeks with thin, pointed fingers. They suspected her of all sorts of ulterior motives and relished in her cleverness. They thought they understood her. 

She could go home and tell her father and brothers that she hadn't intended any of it, and they would just nod and never talk of it again. 

That was all she wanted, all she imagined, as the doctors sewed up the holes and the designers painted on the beauty. For someone to believe that she was still innocent, that she hadn't engineered an elaborate trick to ensure the deaths of other children. 

She protested all through her interview--that no, she hadn't tried to get a lower training score to trick her opponents. That no, her frightened tears were real, not a ploy to seem weaker. That her suddenly merciless killing wasn't the reveal of her true colors. 

The crowd loved the dismissal of her own cleverness. They thought her all the more cunning for it. 

They made her watch the highlights of her games, and suddenly it seemed true. The onscreen Johanna appeared just as ruthless and in control as the Capitol called her. 

The worst part was watching her first kill. To Johanna, this had been the tipping point, the event that had broken her and triggered her silent hunt of the other children. 

Onscreen, it looked perfectly calculated. She almost seemed bored. 

The tribute had been on top of her, whispering in her ear how he was going to rape her. You couldn't hear that in video. (Johanna later bitterly reflected that that kind of brutality appealed to too small an audience to be publicly shown. It reminded people what they were watching.) 

The real Johanna had panicked and decided that since she was already going to die, she might as well take this animal with her. Her arms were pinned down underneath her, but she had a knife in her back pocket. She had desperately stabbed through her own body and into the torso of the boy above her. Shocked, he had rolled off her, and she had slit his throat. 

She had bandaged her wound and spent the next twenty minutes throwing up and crying over the horror of what she had done. That wasn't shown either. 

Johanna believed that she hadn't intended any of it, but watching herself calmly pierce her own skin to kill another, she was less sure. 

And if she was in control, if she had intended all of it, then what the Capitol had done to her was alright. It wasn't an abomination if they were only revealing her true self. 

Johanna had felt sick for days after the interview. 

She had been introduced to Finnick the night before she was due to go home. 

He had terrified her because seeing him was like looking in a mirror. 

Watching him fuck his way through the Capitol over the years had given her the impression that he resembled an overgrown puppy--over eager and with poor self control. He had seemed happy, in the carelessly unthinking way puppies have. He had seemed genuine. 

Genuine in his sluttiness and shallowness, to be sure, but genuine all the same. 

But this Finnick was a sculpture more than a man. He was gorgeous and godlike and terribly inhuman. 

His smile, his laugh, his body: they were all carefully engineered tricks to make you desire him, love him. Just as her weakness, her tears, were a trap to kill you. 

Only his eyes were his own, and they were merciless and cold. 

District Seven often communicated in metaphors. Metaphors allow you to convey feelings without actually mentioning them. The coward's way and the artist's way. Why describe heartbreak when you could say that all roses have thorns? 

And thus sixteen year old Johanna thought of the ocean when she saw Finnick's eyes. 

Once, when Johanna was a small child and her mother was still alive, she had gone to one of the outermost logging camps. The camp was a few miles from the ocean, and they had walked there to see the sea throwing itself upon the cliffs. In picture books, the ocean had been described as blue, with gentle waves and rolling white sand beaches. 

In reality, the ocean was grey and it couldn't care less if Johanna drowned or not. It had no malicious intent, it just didn't care. 


	3. Time does not bring relief; you all have lied

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Johanna goes home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title from a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay

The Victory Tour came too quickly for Johanna's taste. 

Things at home were starting to feel... if not alright, at least having the potential of being alright someday. 

They had moved into the Victor's Village almost immediately after Johanna had arrived back in Seven. With five growing boys and men in a two room house, it wasn't a moment too soon. 

The Village itself was a ghost town, with Blight's house the only other occupied. In the first few days, her father and brothers had spoken in uncertain, hushed voices, and she could sometimes hear Blight screaming during the night. 

After a few nights of waking up hyperventilating from too real, red tinged dreams, Johanna had begun silently dosing herself with valerian root. It didn't fix the nightmares, but it did keep her from tossing and turning for hours before falling asleep, replaying the Games in her head over and over again. She knew it wasn't the healthiest way of dealing, but until she stopped imagining her brothers' faces on the corpses of the other tributes every time she closed her eyes, Johanna didn't really care. 

Milo was the first to break the quiet. He was eleven years old, and he was already taller than Johanna. Milo wasn't a loud boy--none of the Masons were--and he was already working his first job at the paper mill, eagerly anticipating the time when he could join his much older brothers at the logging camps. But he was still a child all the same, and watching him hop around the house, playing an elaborate game that somehow involved sticks, rocks, and a few black walnuts, Johanna thought the Victor's Village might offer something for the living also.

A few days later, her father and oldest brother Gerulf, grumbling unintelligibly about "plastic furniture" and "identical copies," had hauled out the Capitol supplied furniture and tossed it into an empty house. They had spent every following night after work eagerly creating new, wooden furniture. Each piece was a masterpiece, and Gerulf and her father heartily complained about all the extra trouble the Capitol was putting them through, how they weren't craftsmen and never claimed to be, and detailed the mistakes and flaws in each new chair to anyone who would listen. 

Johanna couldn't remember them ever enjoying a project more. 

Blight even began poking his head out once in a while, smiling at Milo in a good natured if puzzled way, and consulting with Gerulf on the serious matter of table legs. 

One night, Cenric had brought his girlfriend Amalie over. Amalie was small and strong, with short dark hair that curled around her ears. She and Cenric had been best friends all of Johanna's life, but it was only in the last year that they had finally admitted of more romantic feelings. Looking at them, it was clear to Johanna that they'd be getting married soon. She supposed she was happy for them, but she also felt a gnawing sense of loss. She didn't want anyone to leave her, not so soon.

Amalie and Cenric had attempted to cook a fine meal for the family, but had instead managed to dunk everything in too much alcohol and light all the food on fire. It was hilarious and not particularly edible. No food in Seven went to waste, so the Masons were left chewing on the charred remains of unidentified things that all tasted like whiskey. 

Amalie had come over every night since. Her and Cenric's cooking skills still left something to be desired, but Johanna came to enjoy having another woman in the house. She had been the lone female for ten years, and Amalie was so busy and practical that Johanna felt safe around her. 

Lovely, sensitive Rien had gone out and bought box after box of creamy, expensive paper. He was the only one who realized that Johanna hated the money she had won from killing other children, that she wanted it all gone. 

When Johanna had first gotten home, she had offered the money to her father, who had refused. He had told her to save it for her own children. Johanna doubted that she would ever have children, and she wanted the money to go to make sure everyone had enough to eat and a warm enough coat, not just for it to accumulate in some Capitol bank fund. But her father was adamant. 

Rien, however, listened and bought paper. He drew people and trees in charcoal and pinned them around the house. Rien, who still walked with a limp from when a tree landed on his leg and would never be as strong as the other men, was a brilliant artist. If there was one good thing that came out of the Games, Johanna thought, it was this. 

Once, Rien drew a picture of Johanna in the Games. It was just of the lower part of her face, and went from her lower eyelashes to the top of her neck. There was a sword in front of her face, and the tip was just barely piercing her upper lip. Rien had used the softest pink he could find to paint her lips, and just a dot of red for the cut. Everything else was in black and white. A few tendrils of dark hair were curling in front of her face, and a single tear was dripping off her eyelashes.

When Rien awkwardly gave it to her, an apprehensive look on his face, she immediately started crying. He was better at dealing with feelings than the rest of her family, and patiently soothed her until she stopped, but he never drew anything from her Games again.

She regretted that. All of the posters in the Capitol celebrating her victory had her standing triumphantly over the dead, or beautiful in her interview dress, or cleverly stalking her victims. There was never anything showing real emotion, showing regret or pain. 

Johanna placed the drawing in her bedroom, and sometimes, when the nightmares got really bad, she looked at it to remind herself that she hadn't intended any of it.

The days and nights seemed to pass in one slow, continuous wave, and suddenly it was time to go on the Victory Tour. She had been dreading it for weeks, having no idea what she was supposed to say to each District, but some thoughtful person had made her a set of speech cards. 

According to the cards, she was clever and fierce and determinedly unapologetic. 

One and Two went fine. She was responsible for a death in each, but some kind of odd warrior code made them respect her as deserving to win because she defeated their children. It didn't make her forgive herself by any means, but it didn't make her feel any worse either. 

She had had no involvement with the tributes from Three, so she just made a generic speech thanking them for their sacrifices and moved on her merry way. 

Four was...

Four smelled like salt and wind and slightly rotting fish. The crowd was silent and angry. 

Apparently Four hadn't been a Career long enough to develop the same mindset as One and Two. 

In the pen up front for the families of the tributes, Henrik's mother had her face pressed down into the mud and was bawling ungracefully and desperately. Four tiny Henrik look-alikes stood next her, their faces grim. 

Henrik had been Johanna's first victim after the boy who had tried to rape her. He had done nothing to deserve his death. Henrik had been away from the others in the Career Pack, collecting food, and Johanna had planted her ax in the back of his head. She didn't doubt that he would have tried to kill her if he knew she was around, but the fact remained that she had killed him completely unprovoked. 

Johanna stumbled through her scripted speech, thanking the District for their sacrifices and discussing what an honor it was to be a Victor. 

Finally, during one terrible pause, one of the Henrik look-alikes yelled out "Murderer! Murderer!" He looked about Milo's age. 

A peacekeeper grabbed his arm and started dragging him away from his family, his brothers gripping onto his legs and his mother still unconsolably crying, not even looking up. 

The rest of the crowd remained eerily quiet, glaring at Johanna. 

Johanna swallowed nervously and told herself that the boy would be fine, that they wouldn't hurt a child. It wasn't until later that she realized why that thought made her feel so sick. 

Johanna couldn't keep going off the cards with all those faces looking at her. It was too much like her nightmares, with the dead resentfully asking over and over again why she was alive when they were not. 

"I... I didn't want to kill Henrik," she got out. "I didn't want to kill anyone. It wasn't my choice. It wasn't my choice." 

She knew that she was breaking her fierce persona, but she didn't think she was saying anything too bad. Everyone knew it wasn't her choice, surely? She was reaped, not a volunteer. 

It wasn't as though she was condemning the Capitol. 

When she got home, they were all dead. Her father and Gerulf and Cenric and Amalie and Rien and Milo. It didn't even matter how, she knew how. 

Blight had fled into his house immediately after they had gotten back and heard the news. She heard him screaming, all day and all night. She wasn't even sure who he was screaming for--himself or her or his family or her family. 

For days, she hid under the unfinished kitchen table and rocked herself back and forth, back and forth. She traced the one leg that had been finished carving, over and over again. She took all the blank paper out and stared at it, willing Rien's drawings to appear. 

Sometimes, she thought heard voices outside--her family coming home from work--and she ran to the door and flung it open, only to see leaves softly drifting down from the trees. 

It got colder and colder, winter approaching, and she built no fires in her house. She didn't deserve fire, a girl like her. 

She left everything exactly in place, waiting for the day everyone would come home and retake their places in her world. Milo's unmade bed, balls scattered across the yard. Tools and unfinished furniture. Paper. An engagement ring never proposed with. 

She waited for Snow to come and explain what had been done to her, give her an enemy besides herself to blame. He never did, and when the first snow came, she went back to the Capitol, bringing with her a delicate little boy and a girl who cried the whole train ride.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comments make Jane happy and when Jane is happy she writes fanfic instead of doing her calculus homework.


	4. Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Johanna returns to the Capitol.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter has some trigger-y stuff. This whole story has trigger-y stuff. If you're going to be triggered, please don't read it.  
> Title is from John Keats' Ode to a Nightingale

The man in front of her was blurry. His mouth was moving, but she couldn't hear anything coming out. The world was silent except for the rushing blood in her ears. 

"Bathroom," she mumbled hazily, stumbling out of the bedroom. 

She clutched frantically at her head, slowly lowering herself to the ground. She stayed completely frozen, gritting her teeth. Her scream was silent and eternal. 

The door wouldn't hold for long. He would be on top of her soon, and this time she would have no knife up her sleeve. 

She couldn't breathe. She couldn't breathe. 

She felt her face grow wet underneath her hands, and it took her a moment to realize that it was her own tears. 

Not again, she thought desperately. It's not fair. It's not fair for all this to be taken away from me. I can't do this again. 

Old phantom pain ripped through her body. Wave after wave of agony and heartbreak and despair. 

It took her a few minutes before she realized that the man wasn't trying to break the door down. That she was safe, if only for a minute.

"Johanna?" the man asked. 

Her head spun again. She would have to walk back out there. She could say whatever she wanted about how coerced she was, but in the end she would lie down on the execution table voluntarily. 

"Coming," she tried to purr.

Snow had finally summoned her to an audience, two days after both of her tributes had been killed at the cornucopia. 

She had yelled at him, she had shrieked, she had screamed. She had delivered a speech, carefully polished in the preceding months, about what a monster he was. She had cried. She had made an inhuman screeching sound that had faded into choked sobs.

Snow had smiled, casually, and waited. His eyes were flat and dead. 

"Miss Mason," he had said, "I am sorry for your losses, and I recognize that you are grieving. But have you considered that you are only blaming me because you know that you are truly responsible for their unfortunate passings?" 

She couldn't think of a single word to say to him. 

"I would be quite happy to recommend you a grief counselor to help you deal with your guilt. But onto matters of business. Victors are very popular in the Capitol, as I'm sure you're aware. You yourself have caught the imagination of several prominent citizens. And, to put it delicately, the Victors occasionally have to 'do their duty' to make our citizens happy. I'm sure you quite understand?" 

"No," she had managed. 

"Miss Mason," he had said, shaking his head disapprovingly. "I thought you were supposed to be one of the clever ones. You will assist Capitol citizens with their physical urges." 

"...Prostitute myself?" she had asked, wearily. She couldn't even get up the energy to swear. "I'll kill myself first." 

Snow had smiled, all white teeth and rotting flesh. "Such a fighter." 

He reached into his desk and pulled out a single white pill. "Poison. Be my guest. We'll announce you overdosed. The Victors are prone to their bad habits." 

She had stared at it. Thought about it. But she couldn't do it. She had killed to stay alive, and she couldn't do it. The drive to keep breathing was too strong. 

So she stepped out of the bathroom. "Hello, sweetheart," she said. It almost sounded confident. 

He mashed his lips into hers. 

She felt nothing but disgust. 

She had never even had her first kiss, nor even particularly thought about it. But she knew it wasn't supposed to feel like this. 

His lips were two dead worms and it was wet all over her face. He was soft in all the wrong places and he held her too tightly. His hands were everywhere and his fingers were fat and sharp. 

She doesn't remember much of the rest of the night, just swaying masses of colors and feeling like she would never be clean again. 

Later, she found herself sitting on Haymitch's lap, crying and crying. She had never even spoken to him before, just gotten an impression of booze soaked sarcasm. But he stroked her back awkwardly, and murmured indistinguishable words in a soft drawl. 

In the morning, she woke up in her own bed, completely naked, wrapped around a fully dressed and uncomfortably sober Haymitch. 

"Good morning, kid," he said, untangling himself. "I'll get Finnick to come say hello, later."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I adore you, lovely reader.


	5. As a god self-slain on his own strange altar

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm not entirely happy with this chapter, but I'll edit it as we go.   
> Chapter title comes from a poem by Algernon Charles Swinburne.

She didn't want Finnick. She didn't want his long legs or his hard chest or his beautiful jaw bones. She didn't want his false smiles or his real empathy. 

It was too much to ask, that they come together, bond over their shared fate. 

It hurt to look at him. To see a god, birthed in blood and foam, chained down. 

He wasn't a person in her eyes. He wasn't a person in anyone's eyes. 

She wasn't a person in her eyes. She wasn't a person in anyone's eyes.

The Games dragged on and on. Most of the tributes died from starvation. Johanna didn't watch.   
   
She wanted Haymitch, maybe. Not for sex, but she couldn't tell the difference very well anymore. She only wanted someone to be close to her, to touch her without cruelty. 

No one touched except to fuck, in her increasingly constricting world. There were new faces nearly every night, but they were all the same. 

Haymitch wouldn't touch her at all. She flirted with him, she ripped her shirt off, she stroked his thigh, she did everything they had taught her. He'd clear his throat and go get a drink. 

It was almost comforting, Haymitch's reliable aversion to her body. But she still wanted to sleep with him. To curl into his warm arms, smell alcohol and dirt.

They marketed her as a ferocious doll, a girl with a dark side begging to be broken. A girl, never a woman. 

It was the exact opposite of her persona in the Games--savage on the outside, fragile on the inside. Whether it was less or more true, she couldn't tell. 

The designers put her in waterproof makeup. The patrons liked to make her cry.

She discovered that she was good at sex, or at least that she was good at pleasing people. A few movements here, a few tears there, a few moans, and she was done. It was repulsive and she hated herself, but the physical act was easy enough. 

She hadn't anticipated this revelation. She had imagined that it would be as hard on her body as it was on her mind. She imagined that she would stumble around in the daylight, a bruised warrior. People would see her in the streets, and they would know she was in pain. 

But her patrons, in general, didn't want to physically hurt her. It was fairly obvious that any reasonably strong man could have overpowered her. 

Instead, they liked to prove themselves cleverer than her. They liked to prove that she, a little girl, was no match for their towering intellects. 

So they crushed her, degraded her, told her she was worthless. Stupid, a slut, a tease, a psychopath. Labels flying everywhere. 

She was a symbol. A symbol of a rebellion, caged and adopted as a pet. How powerful must a state be, to have sex with rebellion? 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comments make my day. Seriously.


	6. I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title comes from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.

The Games ended. The winner was a small, shivering boy with hungry eyes. He had won by default. The Capitol was unamused. 

Johanna stayed in the city. She wasn't sure if this was her choice or not. She couldn't remember making it, but she couldn't remember lots of things. She tried to reason that it was the better choice, to cheer herself up. She was still trying to cheer herself up, in those days. 

The Capitol was deadly, but home was unbearable. At least in the Capitol she had something to fight against. District Seven was a drowning gray mist of grief and nihilism. 

Finnick, Gloss, and Cashmere also stayed. This made her uncomfortable, and rather more convinced that the president had something to do with her presence in the city.

She seemed to have been inducted into the exclusive group of "most successful whores of the year." Johanna wondered, half sarcastically and half not, whether there was some sort of initiation rite into the club. Cake? An orgy? Or did you have to be eligible for two consecutive years, before you were formally invited to join? 

Later on, it had seemed obvious that  
of course President Snow had decided to keep her in the Capitol. Snow had his hands in everything. But at the time, the Snow of Johanna's mind was still represented by the ostentatious narcissist who grandly ordered children to their deaths, and offered poison to little girls. Subtlety did not seem to be his forte. But the true power of President Snow, Johanna later reasoned, was his ability to make all his choices feel like your own. 

It was difficult to tell the passage of time in the Capitol. Men's lips, women's lips, night, day, water, vodka: it all blurred together into one hazy mass of sameness and repression. She locked down everything she could in her mind, and put on a brittle mask of viciousness and uncaring. Or was it a mask? What was she without it? 

The Capitol had no seasons, except fashion. There were no trees, and the streets smelled like lemon furniture polish and lipstick. Any weather was only an excuse to buy new clothes. Johanna heard somewhere that the city was in a temperate, strictly controlled air bubble. It could have been months, weeks, days, since the Games had ended. 

Johanna floated through the streets as if in a dream. She wondered if she was even alive. She never slept, rarely ate, and was followed around by a chirping, worried prep team. They offered her stimulants, plugged IVs into her arm, and dressed her like an enormous, provocative doll until she never looked anything but her best. They also said slightly chiding things about her sexual proclivities until Johanna was ready to stab them with a mascara brush. 

Johanna only ever saw the other Victors in passing, until, one day, she and Finnick were 'invited' to visit the same patron. This was unusual, as most of the people Johanna saw preferred to have her to themselves, to humiliate and degrade her in the privacy of their own homes. 

As it turned out, Johanna was extraneous at this event. Her main purpose appeared to be to keep the man confident about his heterosexuality while he had sex with Finnick. She sat on the bed, naked and smoking, and watched as Finnick perfectly played the romantic lover. He quoted love poetry, told the man he had waited for him for so long, and then was obediently fucked and appropriately undone. It was exciting and seemingly so unscripted that Johanna found it disgusting. 

She didn't enjoy watching Finnick have sex. She didn't enjoy watching, generally. Watching put you in someone's debt, whereas being seen gave you a certain kind of power. She thought about economics, instead of focusing on the way the men moaned and yelled as they came. 

Objectification was her currency in the Capitol. She knew the people that wanted her body, and she knew that they wanted it enough to pay for it. What to do with this information was still up in the air, but she was clever enough to know that a desired object, in limited quantity, could raise its price quite high. She didn't need money, but surely she could find something else to trade. It was her first clear thought for months. 

After it was over, she stubbed her cigarette out into the man's pillow. It burned a small, ashy hole into the fields of white. He was too overcome to notice. 

She stalked out of the room like an affronted cat, and then stopped, waiting. Finnick was pressing a delicate kiss into the corner of the man's mouth, and then inpassionately saying something, presumably something very sweet and gentlemanly. 

Johanna threw on her coat, silently refusing to put back on her dress. The dress was impractical and uncomfortable, and she was glad to be rid of it. She found it ridiculous to wear a coat in the Capitol, as it barely got chilly, but it was too cold to walk around completely naked. 

Finnick was still lingering, and Johanna realized with a scowl that she was waiting for him. He eventually pulled on his pants and casually walked over to her. 

"Ready?" he asked, as if they were a normal couple leaving a party. 

She gave him a tight nod, and they walked out into the night. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading! You all are amazing :)


	7. You know, it's quite a job starting to love somebody.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title comes from Nausea.

Three weeks later, they bought an apartment together. There didn't seem to be much point in waiting. 

Johanna had been living in a series of increasingly alien and isolating hotel rooms. Everything was glass and gold. Her reflection haunted her as she walked through the rooms. She moved hotels every few days, but the mirrors followed. 

Finnick had been living in a bachelor pad that stunk of clichés and cologne. Rough furs and dark leather covered every available surface. It seemed to be permanently dusk, and each piece of furniture could be easily converted into a bed. It was his interior decorator's masterpiece. 

Johanna found it disgusting, and said so. 

It had been awhile since Finnick had heard anything that true. 

So they bought a cramped apartment with a view of a dirty alley, and wished their upstairs neighbors would fight and have sex more quietly. They laid on a lumpy mattress on the floor, and listened to the cars streaming outside.

When Finnick closed his eyes and really focused, the cars almost sounded like the ocean. Johanna had no problem at all hearing the wind rustling through leaves.

They could have afforded an enormous mansion, beautiful furniture, a maid. A room with visual effects so good that they would really feel they were back home in their districts. 

But to find a dusty, unloved corner of the Capitol? To know that none of their neighbors remotely cared who they were? And even more, to not feel as though they were selling their bodies to live in luxury? 

It was home. 

Johanna bought daisies and scattered them through the apartment. She braided them into Finnick's hair and made matching daisy-chain bracelets. 

They never invited anyone over, and the press never found out that the two most eligible Victors were playing house together. It was a secret, a hiding place. 

She and Finnick bought buckets of beautiful, pastel paint, and painted the walls in soft colors. It was relaxing and not flamboyant and the opposite of everything the Capitol desired. 

Finnick acquired kitchen implements and recipe books and began to cook, filling the apartment with heat and the fragrances of food. He went to the grocery store as often as he could find an excuse to, buying exotic spices and herbs. 

Johanna got books. Devouring them as quickly as she could, she curled up in a big armchair, or even better, wrapped around Finnick. He began to call her his falcon, from the way she clung to his arm as she read. 

They never did get a bed frame. 

Johanna cut her hair into a short bob. The designers panicked, until the public shouted its approval. Finnick ran his fingers and mouth through her hair over and over again. 

Finnick wanted a cat. 

To Johanna, a cat was practice for a baby, and Johanna couldn't bear the thought of a baby. Couldn't bear the thought of a child with Milo's eyes and Finnick's hair growing up in the Capitol, or worse, being reaped. 

They lived together for a year, until it was time to go back to their Districts and collect the next round of tributes. Time passed jerkily, a monotone of love and jagged edges that almost fit together, but not quite. 

It didn't matter that Finnick cringed away when Johanna moved too fast, or that he sometimes had a panic attack instead of orgasming. 

It didn't matter that Johanna woke up screaming every night, or had days when she wouldn't speak to anyone at all. 

It didn't matter that Finnick didn't know how to relate to strangers except by flirting. 

It didn't matter that Johanna was full of sarcasm and black humor. That she snapped and snarled and was afraid to get close. 

It didn't matter that Finnick went to the gym every day, or counted every calorie with the obsession of a man who could control nothing else.

It didn't matter that they could never be anything but unfaithful to each other. That they were forced to have sex with the highest bidder on a weekly basis. They didn't talk about it much. 

It didn't even matter that Finnick let himself be sold to keep his family safe, and Johanna's was already dead. 

It didn't matter that Johanna broke plates and glasses when she was angry. Or that she stormed out with declarations of never loving him.

She always came back. 

What did matter was that Johanna refused to stop smoking. That she shot up if there was any promise it would make her feel better. That she knocked herself out with sleeping pills when the nightmares got too bad. That she refused to fantasize of better days. 

Finnick thought they could heal each other, together. That they could get better. That love was the magic, soothing salvation that would bind their scars. Why couldn't their love save Johanna from her drugs, from her sense of futility? 

He wanted to dream of children, of rebellion, of living by the ocean and trees.

Johanna thought of love as simply that, love. Their damaged pieces could complement each other, but they would never be put back together. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading!


	8. Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title from the second coming. 
> 
> This is short. However, I already have most of the next chapter written. It was originally going to be part of the same chapter, but I thought better of it.

Johanna had gotten away with skipping the Victory tour's visit to Seven: instead watching Blight nod confusedly on an enormous screen in Central Square. She had given a cheeky wave from the audience, sitting next to Finnick. 

The Capitol had cooed its contentment over Johanna's reluctance to leave the city. It was to be expected, of course, but nothing could be so charming. And leave it to that rebellious Johanna to stay--and to convince her dear friend Finnick to stay also.

Johanna hadn't wanted to go to the screening. She had threatened for days not to. She had no one left for Snow to hurt anymore, after all. What should she care? 

But it hurt Finnick to hear her say that, and for all Johanna's brashness, she didn't want him to be hurt. It was a lie anyway, because she did care. 

Seeing Blight stumble dazedly before the expanse of green, his words slurring together, made Johanna's eyes sting. She didn't cry. 

It was as if she was missing an essential ingredient for tears. Too little water, too much salt? An once intrinsic recipe lost. 

Sometimes, she would chop onions, blow smoke into her own face--just to prove that her tear ducts were still working. 

She tried to tell herself that it made her tougher. 

Tough Johanna took off her shirt at parties and dared people to feel her breasts. Tough Johanna drank hard liquor and laughed too loud and too bitterly. Tough Johanna agreed when people called her a bitch. Tough Johanna didn't flinch when they hit her. Tough Johanna talked about her games in a bored tone. Tough Johanna didn't cry. 

In the beginning, Johanna had created tough Johanna to get through a few rough nights. Later, tough Johanna became a consistent facet of her image, because Johanna thought it would make her less desirable. 

President Snow and the obscene uptake in her clients disabused her of this notion. 

"Madonna and the whore, Miss Mason," President Snow had said emotionlessly, during a rare meeting in which he had congratulated her on her hard work on behalf of Panem. "Surely even you can grasp that allusion, clever as you're supposed to be." 

But by then it was too difficult to be rid of tough Johanna.

Finnick hated tough Johanna.

Once, during a particularly nasty fight, Finnick had told Johanna that she had too many different faces for him to be able to keep track of them. 

Johanna had snapped back that at least her faces were different from her reality, unlike some people. She was uncertain if this was true, but it was an easy and painful thing to yell at the man she loved. 

Finnick had exploded into tears. He cried a lot. In large, dramatic bursts. He looked like a repentant angel when he cried, not that Johanna would ever tell him that. She had unfortunate and compelling urges to comfort him when he cried. Instead, she stalked away. 

He came crawling to her a few hours later, full of apologies and smelling of expensive perfume. He had a lipstick stain on the collar of his shirt. 

He rubbed her feet and read her Yeats and then they had sex on the bathroom floor. It was wild and just a little bit cruel. Every part of Johanna burned and ached as they screamed and howled synchronously. She felt alive and free and they were as one. 

Sex was another thing Johanna and Finnick sometimes disagreed about. Sex with each other was the best and only consensual sexual contact that either had ever had, but sometimes Finnick fell into too much reflection for Johanna's comfort. 

Finnick thought Johanna deserved to be made love to, slowly and gently, upon heaps of pure white sheets and perhaps rose petals. It would be heavenly--ecstatic and beautiful. He thought his inability to give this to her, and their common preference for desperate and hot sex on whichever surface presented itself as available first, to be a failing, something that they could get over together as a couple. They would get over this fault, heal and move on to sweeter and more romantic things.

Johanna didn't apologize for her angry remarks to Finnick. Tough girls didn't say sorry. 

Tough girls probably weren't supposed to spend weeks worrying over carelessly thrown remarks, either, but fragility always was Johanna's first and most true mask. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you, my spectacular readers


	9. you cannot bear to think that someday it will no longer hurt you like this now

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title from Sound and the Fury.
> 
> I wrote an entirely different chapter, a few weeks ago. It had lots of squishy Odesta and heartbreak. Then I deleted it and wrote this. Y'all can yell at me in the comments.

She sighs, and turns away from the scattered papers on her desk. She goes into the kitchen, pours herself a glass of water. 

Alcohol would be a more fitting drink for the tragic heroine she's presenting herself as, but heroines are not real people. Johanna is tired of being a character, an archetype--even in her own story. 

She leans her face against the cold glass of a window, and reflects. She had imagined that once she had started writing, it would all flow out easily. She could shape the words truthfully, and the fragmented images in her mind would be imprinted onto paper.

She's not going to write about Annie.

You can imagine how that story would go, she's sure. The devastation, the betrayal, the gripping loneliness... 

Perhaps she cried. Perhaps she begged Finnick to reconsider. Perhaps she had sex with Haymitch. Perhaps she stayed in bed for weeks, too depressed to move. 

Oh, the tragedy of it all! 

But Johanna's purpose is not your entertainment. She has no obligation to your outstretched, sympathetic arms. Her mind is not yours. 

Johanna is writing this as a rebellion, remember.

What does it matter, that Finnick fell in love with her? What does it matter, when children are raped and civilizations collapse with no real change except a brief uptake in the casualty numbers? What does it matter, when death is always a constant? 

It matters a great deal.

Instead of writing about Annie, Johanna decides to write about a conversation that never happened, with a Finnick who never existed. 

Fiction is charming this way. 

Johanna sits down at her desk, and picks back up her pen. 

She provides no context for this conversation. In her mind, she imagines it as occurring under a vivid night sky, in an empty version of the Capitol. She can trace the galaxy with her finger tips, and the skyscrapers are no impediment. 

The impracticality of this situation does not phase her. In fact, it seems more honest than the facts. 

* * * 

"Johanna?" 

"Mmm?"

"Do you believe in fate?"

"You're a walking cliché." 

"But do you?" 

"Not exactly."

"What, then?" 

"It's hard to explain." 

She traced the curve of the sky with her ring finger. 

"Try."

"Bossy, aren't you? Fate...seems to me....to imply the presence of something. I believe more in a...lack."

"A lack of what?"

"Of choice." 

"You mean like free will?"

"Something like that, I guess."

"So you believe in God, then."

"Why are we having this conversation? But no, not necessarily."

"We're having this conversation because the stars are shining and the moonlight looks so beautiful on your cheekbones, darling." 

"Oh, shut up." 

"Talk to me about God or I'll write rhapsodies for your eyes." 

"Anything but that! I mean, just because we have no choices, doesn't mean that some floating overhead is making decisions."

"I don't understand."

"Here, let me talk to you about democracy. We're each putting our own vote in, but no one is actually choosing what's going to happen. That doesn't mean there's a king." 

"But if we're all voting, we still have some choice, don't we?"

"It's a metaphor, Finnick. You're not supposed to take it that seriously." 

"Stop being condescending, I'm just trying to have a real conversation here." 

"Sorry."

"It's okay."

"I just..."

"But what's the point then? If there is no king and the votes don't matter?"

"I don't know."

"But I don't want to just love you because I have to! Because it's pre-ordained by some universal order. Without rhyme or reason, without even the benevolent planning of some God." 

She felt a sudden, inexplicable surge of pity for him, and grasped his hand tightly. 

"It's all right. You can have choices." 


	10. And are a little tired now; Tired of things that break, and— Just tired.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title from an e. e. cummings poem.
> 
> The story plods on.

Back to business. Fiction is a luxury.

Finnick called her, a few nights after the announcement of the 75th Hunger Games.

She wished it had been Katniss. She had things she wanted to tell the girl. 

The Capitol had burned Johanna so badly that she could not be the Rebellion's Girl on Fire. She was too cynical, too broken to be a desirable symbol of change. 

You couldn't build a new country from ashes, whatever they said about phoenixes. You needed innocence, you needed faith in free will.

The Rebellion intended to light Katniss up like a match, and parade her flaming glory around to the Districts until they fell on their knees before their new tyrant, hope.

Johanna wasn't particularly against that, in theory. 

But from what she had seen of Katniss, the girl wasn't exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer. Of course, with the Games anything could be an act, but somehow Johanna doubted it. 

It seemed rather unlikely that Katniss had any idea what fire could entail.

And Johanna was damn well certain that no one would tell the girl, not if it would deprive them of their radiant symbol.

But fire was fire, no matter who controlled it. Katniss would be left a shriveled mass of gray. She would be abandoned, crumpled ashes blowing in the wind. They would take all of her, until there was nothing left. And then they would repudiate her. They would worship her as an idol, and then break her on the steps of the temple.

Even Peeta, lovely Peeta with his big blue eyes and true love, would stay with her only for the echo of what-could-have-been. For the remnants of the spark that remained.

And perhaps he too would someday find his Annie, and they would go off on a marvelous adventure of self-healing.

Was Johanna bitter? Maybe just a little bit.

But regardless, Katniss needed to be warned of these things.

As a beacon of change and choice, Katniss needed to be able to consent to her own destruction. She needed to know that her sacrifice might lead to nothing but new faces on old systems. She needed to know that regardless of the outcome, she would be burned and lost.

Or else she would be nothing but another woman used and manipulated for the false ideals of a stagnant world.

After Finnick had explained the basic plan to Johanna (which essentially amounted to nothing more than "keep mockingay alive, wait for hovercraft") over the line Beetee had once specifically debugged just for them, Johanna had asked how much Katniss knew. Finnick was silent.

Johanna had hung up.

She had stayed in the house for the next two days, refusing to allow herself the escape of the woods. She had stared, once again, at the unfinished table, at the blank paper. The barren kitchen, the undisturbed rooms. She was living in a tomb.

To sentence Katniss to the same fate! For the girl of ashes to watch another burn!

She dialed Finnick.

"Okay."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, darling! It's enough that you have come this far in reading my story, but I will press my luck and ask you to drop me a note if you feel like it.


	11. borne back ceaselessly into the past

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title from The Great Gatsby. Hopefully you'll see some familiar elements here, but won't see it just as a mere rehashing.

Blood rain was underrated, she thought. 

She wondered if their jungle adventure even got screen time. Did they show how Blight's face contorted, how he didn't even have time to scream before he died from the collision with the force field? Did they show the way the blood streamed down her face, dripped into her mouth? Did the Capitol think she was beautiful like that, think that the red was poetic? 

Where was the blood even coming from? Was it synthetic? Were there donors? Did they put the blood from all the murdered rebels to good use? Was the spike in public floggings merely to sponsor this event? That thought made her chuckle bleakly. 

Maybe they had been saving it for years. Maybe there was a big blood bank somewhere in the Capitol, and everyone Snow had ever killed had a blood sample in it. President Snow: The Secret Vampire. 

Perhaps they didn't even show the blood rain on air. How much of that could viewers in the Capitol really enjoy, honestly? It catered to a very specific population. A few clips of her terror, and then back to the steamy romance of Panem's favorite couple. More mainstream that way.

Johanna dragged Nuts and Volts out of the jungle. She always got stuck with the bad responsibilities.

Katniss was pissed off, despite Johanna's present of her two crazies. 

Johanna didn't want to think about that, didn't want to ache with how much she understood that. All of Johanna's emotions had been ripped away over the years, until all she was left with was just really fucking angry. 

The funny thing about Katniss was that she was angry over the elevator thing. Of all things to be angry over.

It was true, sure, that one of the reasons she had stripped was to see exactly how innocent the little girl really was. Very innocent, as it turned out.

But she hadn't just undressed to corrupt Katniss. That would make her no better than the Capitol.

It was a warning. A "This Is What Has Been Done To Us, Remember That Your Friends May Be No Better Than Your Enemies."

Admittedly not that best way to make allies, but Johanna had her own agenda. It would ruin the plan to inform Katniss of her impending destruction, but Johanna could at least make sure that Katniss didn't trust the revolutionaries anymore than she trusted Snow. It hurts a lot less to be betrayed when you're expecting it, Johanna knew. 

Of course, it was entirely possible, even likely, that Katniss had missed this message, and instead was just upset that her boyfriend had seen another woman's body. Katniss seemed like the slow sort. And the jealous sort, despite having two boys hanging over her.

For a while on the beach though, it had seemed alright. Finnick had shown off his abs and Johanna had washed off someone else's blood. It was almost like old times. Tick tock.

With the sound of the waves crashing, and the two children bickering, it could have even been a fantasy, the kind that she and Finnick had disassociated away to when the clients became too unbearable. She caught Finnick's eye for a moment, and his fragile half smile spoke volumes. 

You and me, she wanted to say. It's always been you and me. 

Maybe we could have had children, some day. Maybe I would have come around. With you, I could have come around. Our children could have had choices. They would have been better than both of us. 

The clock spun around, is it going forward or backwards? We have to wait for the end to know where the beginning was.

We could have gotten a cat.

Then the jabberjays struck. 

He was running, he was running, he was running so fast.

She couldn't reach him.

He was screaming her name.

The worst part, she thought, was when he realized that it was only the birds. The way he sagged, the way his shoulders had seemed to cave in around him. He curled up against the transparent barrier, and Johanna tried to touch his skin. She only felt the smooth slide of glass.

Mirrors upon mirrors.

She was under the table and they were all dead. The wood would never be carved and the paper was all empty.

There were no tears and her throat couldn't make a sound.

The ocean didn't care whether you lived or died and drowning was slow and cold.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You guys make my day.


End file.
